As the cost of computers and other electrical equipment continue to drop in price, the manufacturers of storage devices, such as memory devices and hard drives, are forced to lower the cost of their components. At the same time: computers, video games, television, and other electrical device markets are requiring increasingly larger amounts of memory to store their respective images, photographs, videos, movies, music and/or other storage intensive data. Thus, besides reducing cost, manufacturers of storage devices are also pressured to increase the storage density of their devices to remain competitive. This trend of increasing memory storage density while reducing cost required to create the storage has been on-going for many years, and even optical storage such as CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-R/W, DVD, and DVD-R variants are being challenged by device size limitations and cost.
To improve the operation of memory storage elements, it is often desired to increase breakdown voltages of either the memory storage element or an associated control element. One prior art solution to increase the breakdown voltage involves the use of area ratioing between two tunnel junction devices (that function as the memory storage element and the associated control element) that are arranged in series to protect one of the tunnel junctions. Multiple masks are required to area ratio tunnel junction devices. Such use of multiple masks requires additional costs, processing time, and processing complexities. Area ratioing between tunnel junctions in series requires subminimum and/or sub lithographic processing and structures which increase manufacturing yield losses, with resulting higher cost. There is accordingly a need for economical, high capacity memory structures.